What were they thinking? Why our jury of architects picked three projects for top honors.(from the editor)

Here at ra, we look forward to our design awards competition every year, always excited about what our jury of architects will elevate to Project of the Year. More often than not, our jury falls in love with a quiet jewel box of a custom home, the product of abundant talent and a limitless budget. Not so this year. This go-round, there was an edgy impatience with the solipsism of such houses. They're beautiful, of course, and everyone admires them as artistic expressions of their owners' and architects' vision. But in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and, on the other side of the scale, another record year for housing appreciation, our judges were looking for something less romantic and more practical. They were searching for housing solutions with broader potential for application. And they found some potent ideas in the work of Torti Gallas and Dan Rockhill's Studio 804. So much so that their discovery led to our first-ever tie among three projects and two firms for Project of the Year.

Torti Gallas's project, a HOPE VI community in Philadelphia, is especially poignant to behold after the recent passing of urbanist Jane Jacobs. Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza replaces precisely the kind of high-rise, low-income housing complex Jacobs reviled. In its stead, the architects and planners laced a delicate fabric of old buildings and new, low-income housing and moderate, residential units and retail, all designed with sensitivity to the palette of the original neighborhood. The firm listened to what the residents loved about their community and how they wanted to live and then responded with empathy and ingenuity. "It's not about signature architecture," one judge said of the project. "It's about modesty. It has a bigger responsibility than this moment in ...